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As bitcoin continued its downward slide Tuesday, U.S. regulators are reportedly looking into whether its record-breaking rally last year was the result of market manipulation. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether traders used tether, a controversial cryptocurrency that founders say is backed 1:1 by a U.S. dollar, to prop up bitcoin, according to a report from Bloomberg News, which cited three people familiar with the matter.

Reports abound of homeowners and businesses unplugging from the power grid and opting instead to generate and store their own electricity. Such grid defections may make sense in places where electricity rates are sky-high or service is spotty. But for just about everywhere else, it’s far more sensible to do the very opposite: interconnect regional electricity networks to form a globe-spanning supergrid.

At 70 years old, Prince Charles is the longest-serving heir apparent in British history-a distinction that hasn't always helped his already-strained public persona. For years, the Prince of Wales was seen as stuffy and impatient to inherit the throne. Thanks in large part to the scandal surrounding his divorce from Princess Diana and the huge impact her untimely death had on the public, Charles spent a long time as one of the less popular members of the royal family.

The U.S. has spent over $5.9 trillion on wars that have directly led to the deaths of close to 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks in September 2001.
Around 370,000 died due to direct war-related violence, while several times more died as a result of the indirect effects of war such as malnutrition and damaged infrastructure, according to Costs of War, an annual research project published by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

A year ago, Facebook started using artificial intelligence to scan people's accounts for danger signs of imminent self-harm. Facebook Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis is pleased with the results so far. "In the very first month when we started it we had about 100 imminent response cases," which resulted in Facebook contacting local emergency responders to check on someone. But that rate quickly increased.

A new study has found that the more literally a person understands metaphorical statements and the more religious they are, the more likely they are to share pseudo-profound bullshit on social media. The new research, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, replicated Gordon Pennycook’s 2015 study on bullshit receptivity — meaning the propensity to interpret nonsensical sentences as profound statements — using a sample from two Eastern European countries.

If you haven't read The New York Times' blockbuster 6,000-word opus on how Facebook has dealt with a sequence of scandals, it's a worthwhile investment of your time. Based on interviews with 50 people, it is rich with devastating anecdotes and mini-scandals. In its own right, the black-ops mission to cast George Soros as the puppet master behind an anti-Facebook movement is startling and disturbing.

Climate change could reduce fertility rates in male insects by at least half, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. This is bad news for bugs and humans alike, because insects play a crucial role in pollinating our crops and stabilizing many of the food webs and ecosystems that we rely on. Led by Kirs Sales, a postgraduate researcher at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the research found that increasingly intense heat waves pose a serious threat to the reproduc...

A number of states had education bonds on Tuesday’s election ballots. Voters approved bonds to increase funding for education in New Jersey, New Mexico and Rhode Island, while similar bonds or referendums were defeated in Arizona and Colorado. Now legislators need to direct the new funding, as well as existing education funding, where we most desperately need it: science education.

I first entered the world of entrepreneurship as a 16-year-old website developer. Since then, I’ve moved onto bigger enterprises, like founding Adventure Capital, a venture fund and incubator that starts businesses in developing countries.

A deal between a traditional ATM manufacturer and a cryptocurrency vending machine firm will make it possible to buy bitcoin at tens of thousands of locations in the United States using a debit card. Bitcoin ATM firm LibertyX and regular ATM manufacturer Genmega have forged a partnership which will make it possible to purchase bitcoin using a debit card at up to 100,000 locations in the United States.

This week’s FTC hearings on the growing power of companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google only included economists who have taken money, directly and indirectly, from giant corporations that have a stake in the debate.

Think of it as a biological antenna. Researchers have discovered a species of butterfly that enlarges its wing veins to pick up sounds it wouldn’t otherwise hear—a strategy that may be critical to its survival. Many butterflies possess tiny ears, often in the form of membrane-covered cavities at the base of their forewings. But scientists didn’t know the insects could boost their hearing with other parts of their bodies.

The Trump Organization has filed a lawsuit seeking to reclaim $90,000 in unpaid fees from a Trump Tower resident who died in an April fire at the tower. The board of Trump Tower Condominium — through Trump Organization lawyer Sonja Talesnik — filed the suit in Manhattan Supreme Court late Tuesday against the estate of 67-year-old Todd Brassner seeking the common charges and fees. The New York Post reports Brassner's heirs, Todd and Heather Brassner, did not return calls seeking comment.

The odds of seeing a deer are pretty high if you live close to a forest. Just in my own neighborhood the other day, I saw one roaming around in a neighbor’s backyard. A lot of people find deer to be a nuisance, claiming that the animals ruin their backyards by stomping on their plants and eating their grass and flowers. Having said that, I think this story might melt even the coldest of hearts and can potentially make all angry backyard owners rethink their perceptions of deer.